Ballets par Erik Satie

No. 390 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast390

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Our new montage this week explores the music of Erik Satie, and specifically some of his dance and ballet music.

According to Musicaneo, French composer Erik Satie is one the most enigmatic composers of the 19th century. Like many creative people, he had his own weird habits and features that may seem way too strange today.

How eccentric?. Erik Satie didn’t let a single person in his tiny room at No.6 at Rue Cortot for… 27 years. After composer’s death, piles of all kinds of trash were discovered there. Amid dozens of umbrellas and newspapers, two pianos were found, one above the other, with pedals interconnected. That weird sculpture served as storage for various parcels, papers and scores of music. Among them, the music for Jack in the Box thought lost since 1905.

In June 1926, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his birth, Jack in the Box was produced by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with choreography by George Balanchine, settings by André Derain, and the music orchestrated by Satie's friend Darius Milhaud.

Parade is a ballet choreographed by Leonide Massine, with music by Erik Satie and a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau. The ballet was composed in 1916–17 for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Satie welcomed the idea of composing ballet music (which he had never done before) but refused to allow any of his previous compositions to be used for the occasion, so Cocteau started writing a scenario (the theme being a publicity parade in which three groups of circus artists try to attract an audience to an indoor performance), to which Satie composed the music (with some additions to the orchestral score by Cocteau).

Mercure is a 1924 ballet with music by Satie. The original décor and costumes were designed by Pablo Picasso and the choreography was by Léonide Massine, who also danced the title role. Subtitled "Plastic Poses in Three Tableaux", it was an important link between Picasso's Neoclassical and Surrealist phases and has been described as a "painter's ballet."

Relâche is another 1924 ballet. Imagined by Francis Picabia, the title was thought to be a Dadaist practical joke, as relâche is the French word used on posters to indicate that a show is canceled, or the theater is closed.

To complete the podcast, I added some piano music by Satie composed for the play Le piège de Méduse. The musical score is a series of very short dances in popular modes (quadrille, waltz, mazurka, polka, etc.), written in Satie's most humorously straight-faced manner, and reminiscent of some of Satie's other works.

I think you will love this music too.